Are Statutes Copyrighted? What the Law Says About Copying It

You want to put the text of a state law in your product, and you fear a lawyer's letter. That is a fair worry. For the law itself, the answer is good news.

Short answer: no. Nobody can hold copyright in the text of a statute (a law passed by a legislature) or in a court opinion. The Supreme Court said in 2020 that "no one can own the law." What can be owned is the extra material a private publisher writes around the law, such as its own notes and summaries. So the question to ask is who wrote the piece you want to copy.

Written and checked on 12 October 2026. This is general information, not legal advice; check the cited statute or opinion before relying on it.

TL;DR

• The text of statutes and court opinions has no copyright. A federal statute sets the rule for federal works. A Supreme Court doctrine covers state statutes and all court opinions.
• Notes a legislature's own commission directs are free too. The Georgia case says no one can own them.
• Notes a private publisher writes on its own can be owned. That includes a paid database's summaries and headnotes, if they are original.
• A copyright notice on a state website is not the last word. It can be wrong, partial or about something else.
• Copyright is not the only rule. A site's terms of use are a separate question, covered in our guide to using state statutes in a commercial product.

Official text, as of 12 October 2026

Citation: Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150, 590 U.S. ___ (decided April 27, 2020), and 17 U.S.C. § 105(a).

What the Court said: "The animating principle behind this rule is that no one can own the law." Chief Justice Roberts wrote that line. The Court split five to four. Read the opinion on the Supreme Court's website.

What the federal statute says: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." That is 17 U.S.C. § 105(a), on the U.S. Code site. The House site was down for maintenance when we checked, so we read the text on Cornell's Legal Information Institute copy of the Code.

What changed in 2025 and 2026: we read no change to the Court's 2020 holding. The source notes on the § 105 page list amendments dated December 2024 and December 2025. The section now has subsections (b) to (d) on works by civilian faculty at certain federal academies and universities. We did not read the amending laws. Subsection (a) is the sentence quoted above. We did not review other changes in state law beyond the statutes quoted below.

Who can own what

An annotation is a note under a section of law. It might sum up a court case or list a related article.

Why a legislature cannot be the author

Copyright protects "original works of authorship." So a work needs an author. The Court has held since the 1800s (the leading case is Banks v. Manchester, 1888) that judges cannot be the author of what they produce as judges. In 2020 it said the same about legislators.

The rule covers more than the final law. The Court said it includes "final legislation" and also "explanatory and procedural materials" that legislators create as part of their duties. Its examples were floor statements, committee reports and proposed bills.

The U.S. Copyright Office agrees in its practice manual. Section 313.6(C)(2) says the Office "will not register a government edict." Any federal, state, local or territorial government counts. The list includes "legislative enactments" and "judicial decisions." The Compendium chapter we read is dated January 28, 2021.

Our post on legal data provenance tells the longer history.

What the Georgia case did and did not decide

Georgia's official code has two layers: the statutes, and notes under each one. A private company, LexisNexis, wrote the notes. It did so under a work-for-hire agreement with the state's Code Revision Commission, which supervised the work. A nonprofit posted the whole code online, and the Commission sued over the notes.

The Court held that the notes could not be copyrighted. It treated the Commission, an arm of the legislature, as their author, and lawmakers cannot be authors. The company's labor, the Court said, "redounds to the Commission."

Here is the limit. The Court noted that the Commission "did not claim copyright in the statutory text or numbering." So the case did not rule on a state that does claim its text or numbering. For the statute text itself, the rule rests on the doctrine (the Court said it covers "final legislation") and on the Copyright Office's manual.

The hard copy of the annotated code retailed for $412.00 when the Court ruled. The free online version had no notes.

Two real states, and a third that says the opposite

States do not all say the same thing about their own code. Each statement below comes from the state's own statute.

Illinois. 25 ILCS 135/5.04(a) deals with the Illinois Compiled Statutes. They are "entirely in the public domain for purposes of federal copyright law." That includes "the statutes themselves and the organizational and numbering scheme." Read it on the Illinois General Assembly site. Our guide to finding and citing Illinois law tells how that code came about.

California. Government Code § 10248.5 covers the information the Legislative Counsel makes public. That information "is within the public domain." The state "retains no copyright or other proprietary interest in" it. That information, under § 10248, includes the California Codes, the state Constitution and statutes enacted on or after January 1, 1993. The section was added in 2016. See also finding and citing California law.

Idaho. Idaho Code § 73-210 goes the other way. It says copyright of all compilations "shall be owned by the state of Idaho" and that the Idaho Code Commission may "grant the use of the copyrights." The history line says it was added in 1949. Whether Idaho enforces this today, and whether a court would uphold it, is not verified in our October 2026 review. See finding and citing Idaho law.

So read the state's own statement. A notice on a page might claim more than the law gives, and an old statute can still sit on the books.

Case law: opinions are free, some extras are not

Judges cannot hold copyright in their opinions. Nor can they hold it in their own headnotes, the short summaries at the top. The Court said so in Banks v. Manchester. The Copyright Office's manual says the rule applies to binding opinions "issued by any federal, state, local, or territorial court."

A publisher is in a different spot. In Callaghan v. Myers, the Court upheld a reporter's copyright in explanatory materials he made himself. By the same logic, a database's own summaries and notes can be protected if they are original. So "is case law copyrighted?" has a split answer: the opinion no, the vendor's own add-ons maybe.

Federal documents with outside material inside

Federal works are free. A federal publication can still carry material that is not. The Government Publishing Office says on its policy page that "public documents can generally be reprinted without legal restriction." It adds a warning. "Government publications may contain copyrighted material which was used with permission of the copyright owner." A stock photo in an agency report is the usual example. For the wider picture, see our complete guide to US law data.

Questions to ask before you copy

1. Who wrote this piece? A lawmaker, a judge, or a private publisher?
2. Is it the text, or an add-on? Notes, indexes, headnotes and summaries are add-ons.
3. What does the site claim, and where? Check the legal notice, the footer, and the state's own statute on its code.
4. What do the terms of use say? They are a separate question from copyright.
5. Does your product depend on the answer? If so, have a lawyer read the sources.

What goes wrong

• Treating "public domain" as covering the whole page. The notes, the index or the site design may belong to someone.
• Believing a notice proves ownership. It may be wrong, or about the site and not the law.
• Copying a paid database's annotated code. The statute text is free. The vendor's own notes may not be.
• Mixing up copyright and contract. A subscription contract applies, whatever the copyright rule says.
• Reusing a federal PDF unchecked. A chart or photo inside may be licensed.

FAQ

Are laws copyrighted?

Not the text. Statutes and court opinions have no copyright. Extra material is different, so check who wrote it.

Can you copyright a law?

A legislature or a court cannot, because lawmakers cannot be the "author" of the law they make. This post does not cover a model law that a private group drafts before a legislature adopts it. That is a separate question.

Is the law public domain?

Close to it, but do not use the phrase as a blanket claim. It covers the text of the law. It does not automatically cover a publisher's notes, an index, a site's design or a photo inside a federal report.

Are annotated statutes copyrighted?

It depends on who wrote them. Notes made under a legislature's direction, as in Georgia, are free. A vendor's own notes may be protected if they are original.

Is case law copyrighted?

Opinions and judge-written headnotes are not. A publisher's original summaries, tags and headnotes can be, so check what a database added.

Can I copy statutes out of Westlaw or Lexis?

The statute text has no copyright. Your subscription contract is a separate matter, so read it. Our guide to using state statutes in a commercial product covers contracts and site terms.

Does this change by state?

What a state claims for itself does change, as Illinois, California and Idaho show. The Georgia holding comes from federal copyright law, so it applies in every state. It did not decide whether a state may claim its statute text or numbering, because Georgia did not. Read the state's own page for more.

For the US statutes, regulations and court rules these laws sit in, see the US primary law API.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.